Climate change, 1990s style. What have we learned?

Between 1892 and 2012, Statistics New Zealand published an annual yearbook. As noticed by Matt Lowrie, the 1992 Yearbook included this sidebar which departed from the usual dry style of the previous hundred years:

Plus ça change. Thirty-two years later, New Zealand still has one of the highest rates of car ownership in the world, Paris is eliminating most of its on-street parking, and Sydney has just opened another light rail line. I wonder what caused this outburst from the normally staid statistics agency. Did the new Chief Statistician, Len Cook, want to shake things up a bit?

What particularly caught my eye was this bit:

"In New Zealand the average car currently manages a mileage of 100 kilometres per 10 litres. To reach the Government’s target of a 20 percent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000, this would have to be cut to 100 kilometres per 3.5 litres."

Even under the generous interpretation that the target here refers to new cars only, we’re still nowhere near 3.5 l/100km; the last few years hover around 6-7 l/100km. Pretty startling when you consider that the popular Honda Civic (a kind of large hatchback or small station wagon) was already delivering 5.3 l/100km in 1985, and that twenty years after the introduction of the hybrid Toyota Prius in 2001, only 2% of the light vehicle fleet was hybrid.

But enough about cars. What about that Government target of a 20% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2000? Where did that come from? Needless to say, we’re not there yet either. Gross emissions of long-lived gases, and net emissions of all gases, are both up 40% on 1990 levels. This year, despite the downturn, 210,000 fossil-fueled cars will be imported, which if parked up would fill the entire length of State Highway 1. (Sorry, I mentioned cars again.)

To answer this I want to go back to a fascinating document from 1990, “Responding to Climate Change: A Discussion of Options for New Zealand”.

This was the year of the first IPCC report as well as of New Zealand’s first reports on climate science, climate impacts, and policy options. It was the year that both Labour and National (who defeated the incumbent Labour party in the October 1990 general election) adopted emissions targets. The May 1990 Climate Options report led to Labour adopting a target of –20% on 1990 levels by 2005. The election was to be held on 27 October; with a major international climate meeting falling on 29 October, National announced their own, more ambitious target (–20% on 1990 levels by 2000) just two days before the election.

The 1990 Climate Options Report

The report is comprehensive and offers 93 different options for consideration. They are grouped under social and behavioural measures, planning measures, market measures, legislative and regulatory measures, energy, transport, commercial buildings and households, industry, energy efficiency, agriculture, and forestry. Pretty comprehensive, and all of the options are given a balanced hearing. Any or all of them would have been a good idea.

Transport, as such a large source of emissions, is given a particularly thorough going-over. Suggestions include mandatory tune-ups, fuel efficiency standards, rebates for scrapping old vehicles, lower speed limits, fuel efficiency standards, fuel efficiency labelling, business tax incentives and levies, CO2-linked registration fees, integrated transport planning (hah!), mode shift such as rail freight, responsible town planning, staff transport, optimisation of freight routing and loading, and alternative fuels – CNG, biogas, bioethanol, electricity, and hydrogen.

One of the transport options in the 1990 report. 45 mpg is equivalent to 6.3 l/100km, a level that has still not been reached in 2024.

What’s notable is that all of these ideas were either already in use or under active consideration in many countries. The US introduced fuel efficiency standards in 1975. Norway introduced EV incentives in 1990, after the pop group A-ha had toured the country in an EV (refusing to pay tolls) the previous year. (Thirty-six years later, a quarter of the cars in Norway are electric, which gives some idea of the time and determination required for a technology transition. Per-capita transport emissions in Norway did not begin falling until 2010, and have only now returned to 1990 levels. On its present course, Norway will have decarbonised road transport by 2050, a sixty year journey.)

Photo: Morten Harket (left) and Magne Furuholmen from A-ha with Prof Rostvik (second left) and Frederic Hauge with their converted electric Fiat.

So what happened? Unfortunately, from a promising start, the front fell off New Zealand’s climate response almost immediately. As Kirsty Hamilton writes,

Consideration of transport emissions virtually fell off the radar for years or decades. Consider the fate of just two of the policy options, fuel efficiency standards and labelling. (I lied when I said “enough about cars”.) They did not progress during the 1990s, but when Labour returned to power in 1999, standards and labelling did eventually make it into a policy document, the New Zealand Transport Strategy 2002. Labelling came into effect in April 2008, but standards fell victim to the election later that year that brought National back to power. Without standards, labelling did next to nothing. Another attempt by Labour to introduce standards in 2018 was blocked by New Zealand First; it took a further electoral cycle before standards were finally came into effect in 2023, 33 years after they were first suggested. That same year National returned and immediately weakened the standards.

 

 

Emissions of newly registered light vehicles, 2014-2024, showing a reduction from 208 gCO2/km in 2014 (8.9 l/100km) to 156 gCO2/km in 2024 (6.7 l/100km). The Clean Car Discount (feebate) was in effect from July 2021 to December 2023.